Selected Results of the Workshop on Data Storage Research 2025

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

With the emergence of new computing paradigms (e.g., cloud and edge computing, big data, Internet of Things, deep learning) and new storage hardware (e.g., non-volatile memory, shingled-magnetic recording disks) a number of open challenges and research issues need to be addressed to ensure sustained storage systems efficacy and performance. The wide variety of applications demands that the fundamental design of storage systems should be revisited to support application-specific semantics. Existing standards and abstractions need to be reevaluated; new sustainable data representations need to be designed to efficiently support emerging applications. To take advantage of hardware advancements, new storage software designs are also necessary to maximize overall system efficiency and performance.

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Selected Results of the Workshop on Data Storage Research 2025 (PDF)

Article Section:

FILE SYSTEMS AND STORAGE